A team of technologists working with Microsoft and others produce a 3D-printed painting in the style of Dutch master Rembrandt.

The Microns project aims to decipher the brain’s algorithms in an effort to revolutionize machine learning. By Emily Singer.

In 1950, the brilliant mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing began his seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” with a simple query: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ” It is a question that still resonates today, because it is essentially incoherent and thus unanswerable. Turing himself quickly turned to a more pragmatic approach, proposing the now famous Turing test. While there are many versions today, they all essentially involve a human...

You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter. Indeed, big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s scary thought experiments around what AI might lead to could well sustain a new strain of Nordic noir. There are, indeed, reasons to be concerned.

A British startup is using the unique abilities of convolutional neural networks to do a sort of scaled-up version of Adobe’s content-aware fill — but instead of filling in the gaps in a picture, it’s imagining a whole new picture, larger and more detailed than the original. Kind of hard to believe without seeing it, right? That’s why they call their company Magic Pony. Just emerging from semi-stealth mode (and even then, only barely), Magic Pony Technology’s researchers have trained their...

Last month, AlphaGo, a computer program specially designed to play the game go, caused shock waves among aficionados when it defeated Lee Sidol, one of the world’s top-ranked professional players, winning a five-game tournament by a score of 4-1. Why, you may ask, is that news? Twenty years have passed since the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and we all know computers have improved since then. But Deep Blue won through sheer computing power...

Finding evidence that someone compromised your cyber defenses is a grind. Sifting through all of the data to find abnormalities takes a lot of time and effort, and analysts can only work so many hours a day. But an AI never gets tired, and can work with humans to deliver far better results. A system called AI2, developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, reviews data from tens of millions of log lines each day and pinpoints anything suspicious.

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple's iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years. The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services...

If you've been following the predictions made by UNU, a new "Swarm Intelligence" platform from Unanimous A.I., you might bet on the Kentucky Derby this weekend and won big, really BIG. That's because a day before the race, UNU's picks were published for the first four horses, in order. It's a bet called the Superfecta that paid 540 to 1 odds. And that's exactly how the horses came in. And this is not the first stunning pick UNU has made.

An “artificial-intelligence attorney” created using technology from IBM’s Watson has snagged its first customer, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be appearing in the courtroom anytime soon.

Welcome to the new world of artificial intelligence. Soon, we won't program computers. We'll train them. Like dolphins. Or dogs. Or humans. Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box. You could analyze a subject’s behavior—ring bell, dog salivates—but thoughts, memories, emotions? That stuff was obscure and inscrutable, beyond the reach of science. So these behaviorists, as they called themselves...

Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. These days he is probably best known as a prophet of The Singularity, one of the leading voices predicting that artificial intelligence will soon surpass its human creators — resulting in either our enslavement or immortality, depending on how things shake out. Back in 2012 he was hired at Google as a director of engineering...

Researchers disagree on when artificial intelligence that displays something like human understanding might arrive. But the Obama administration isn’t waiting to find out. The White House says the government needs to start thinking about how to regulate and use the powerful technology while it is still dependent on humans. “The public should have an accurate mental model of what we mean when we say artificial intelligence,” says Ryan Calo, who teaches law at University of Washington.

Law professor says emerging artificially intelligent attorneys will displace some human lawyers. For those thinking of law school, keep in mind that technology may revolutionize the profession before you earn that J.D. In the research-driven, labor-intensive legal profession, the age-old question of man vs. machine is being answered as some law firms have begun to use an “artificially intelligent attorney” to research and hash out legal issues – a trend that legal minds predict will displace some human lawyers.

KnuEdge is looking to pioneer the hardware behind AI development, with its KnuPath processor, which features 256 cores and can stack half a million times.

I’m a big believer in capitalism today. We live in a world where not everyone’s effort is equal. Yes, capitalism is grossly unfair in some parts — based on your birth, inheritance and a range of other factors. But it’s also one of the only systems we have the accounts for the effort you put in to produce things that other people want to use. And yet, I can also see an end. Capitalism’s greatest threat is it’s own progress. The technology capitalism has created is systematically undermining it. Which is why we may have to rethink it.

In his new book, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, Adam Kucharski details how trying to understand dice games led one mathematician to develop probability theory, how one of the first wearable computers was designed to covertly predict the fall of a roulette ball, and how poker-playing bots are advancing more quickly than we think. As he shows, science, mathematics, and gambling have long been intertwined, and thanks to advances in big data and machine learning...

We're just at the beginning of working out the tasks machines will make us better at.

The robots might take our jobs. But they'll also create new ones.

You’ll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe’s church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?